James Decker - The Burn Zone

I put down my washer rigging, along with the bucket of squeegees and glass cleaner, next to the worn counter where a tin pot sat still dirty on the hot plate. Even in the dark I could see the clutter that had built up. Dirty clothes were draped over the sofa and chairs, and pretty much every counter and tabletop had hit capacity. I had some major cleaning to do.

Ling hobbled out from the kitchen, peering up at me from under heavy, wrinkled eyelids and looking tired. She noticed the spray paint on the door as it swung shut, and put one hand over her mouth.

“It’s okay,” I told her. “It’s no big deal.”

“I didn’t even hear—”

“It’s okay, Ling, really.” I glanced back. “I bet you anything it was that little Heng shit. Punk’s going to end up in jail for sure. Everything go okay?”

She nodded and wrinkled her nose. “I fed it at the times you said. I entered the log too, like you said.” .

I peered through the bars of the crib, the worry an unconscious habit. Ling noticed and added, “I know they’re delicate. I was careful.”

“Sorry, I know. Thanks for doing it.”

“They’re so ugly.” She frowned, the wrinkles in her face deepening. “Do you need the stipend that bad? Doesn’t your father take care of you?”

“Guardian,” I corrected. She waved a bony hand at me. “We both work. What do you want?”

She looked at me critically.

“You’re twenty now,” she said. “Why are you still here anyway? You should be on your own.”

“I was on my own until I was twelve. Cut me some slack.”

“You’re not twelve anymore. You’re a woman now.” She shook out a cigarette of her pack, staining the end pink as she held it between her lips.

“Yeah, I know.”

“Find a man,” she said, lighting the smoke and sucking down a small gray cloud. “Get on the list to have a real baby, not one of those.”

My face flushed, making the sunburn flare up. I reminded myself that Ling didn’t know.

“Why don’t you like them?” I said, nodding over at the crib.

“They don’t belong here.”

“Well, they’re stranded, Ling. It’s not like they have a choice. Besides, we’re better off now, aren’t we?”

She waved her hand again, dismissive. Ling was old, and probably didn’t care much about brain band, jump-space gates, or graviton tech. I thought she would have at least cared about the defense shield the haan were building for us, but maybe she didn’t care much about that either. It was a big-ticket item for me. When the first pieces started going up in six months, I’d feel a lot better.

Ling watched Tānchi paw at the air, the scalefly buzzing in a circle above him, and sighed. “We shouldn’t let them breed.”

“They have to have some or they’ll die out.”

“Let them die out. Governor Hwong should put a stop to it. He would never agree to this.”

“He did, though.”

She frowned again. She wouldn’t criticize Governor Hwong—her loyalty to him was too ingrained—but a look of betrayal flashed in her eyes. No one was sure exactly why the haan wanted the human-haan surrogate program, or exactly why Hwong agreed to it. Some thought the haan were controlling him. Others thought the haan had made the flow of tech and the promise of the defense screen dependent on it. There were a million theories as to why the haan would put their fragile young in our brutish hands, but if nothing else it was a good show of how little a threat they really were. They were immune to all disease and most toxins, but their bodies broke all too easily. Wherever they came from, it was a gentler world than ours.

“They know how hard they make it, Ling,” I said. “They hate how hard they make it. They’d leave if they could.”

“Your father should put a stop to it,” Ling said. I almost corrected her again, but didn’t bother. “How is he anyway?”

“Okay, I guess. He’s on patrol in Měnggŭ Province and I haven’t heard from him in a while. He’s been kind of blowing me off.”

“Maybe he found a girl there,” Ling joked.

“He wouldn’t—” I started, meaning to say that Dragan wouldn’t hook up with a Pan-Slav when of course, he was Pan-Slav himself, or used to be. “He doesn’t have a girl,” I snipped instead, and Ling smiled. “They’ve probably got him off dodging bullets, or…”

I stopped myself before I went down that road again. I didn’t like to think about him over there. The foreign buildup to the south and offshore was bad, but the Pan-Slav border territories, especially the Měnggŭ and Hasakesitan provinces, were the worst. The Pan-Slav Emirates were falling apart, and they were looking across the border at us like we were the last floating straw to grab on to. All kinds of weapons, even nukes and biological stuff, had been split up by new borders, and the pieces were getting grabbed up by desperate, starving lunatics with Dragan right there in the thick of it.

“Your father is brave,” Ling said. “He is there to keep us safe, to keep you safe.”

“Once it’s up we should just wipe them out,” I muttered. “We could do it then. Six months to start, another year to build, and then we should just… wipe them all out.”

“It’s not so simple.”

“Well, not easy like Měnggŭ or Hasakesitan, but once the shield’s active, what’s to stop us?”

“Those territories were spent,” she said. “Without the tech to make the space valuable, it was barren and their people were dying. They had to let us take it. This is different.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry, Ling. I’ll just be glad when he’s back in Hangfei. He should be in tomorrow night.”

“Good.”

“Look, thanks for covering, really. I know you don’t get it, but I need this gig.”

I fished a short stack of coin along with a crumpled paper bill from my pocket, and put the coins in her hand, curling her knobby fingers around them.

“You’re a good girl,” she said.

“Thanks.” I smoothed out the red bill and held it out so she could see. “Got any shine back in your place?”

She grinned, pinching the cigarette in her lips, and reached into the pocket of her knit shawl. She drew out a glass pint bottle filled with crystal clear liquid and handed it to me. As I took it, she plucked the bill from between my fingers.

“Thanks again,” I said. “He’ll settle down once I feed him. You have a good night, Ling.”

She patted my cheek, and her smile faded a little.

“They are a mistake,” she said, nodding toward the crib.

She hobbled past me, then out the front door and back down the hall toward her apartment. When the door closed, Tānchi keened again, and I saw him fidget behind the crib’s bars.

“Hey, sweetie.”

I scratched my head and remembered the smoke tucked behind my ear. I found my lighter in the bottom of one pocket and sparked it up, dragging until the crackling fibers formed a cherry. I sucked in a lungful and felt the nicotine-tetraz blend begin to calm the gnawing in my belly, at least a little. I blew the smoke out through my nose and felt the kid relax a little. Not because of the chems—they didn’t have any effect on him—but because the mite connection worked both ways and so when my brain chilled, his did a little too.

It meant he sensed when something was wrong too, though, and I could feel anxiety pricking in his mind as I approached the crib. His big, flat, ember orange eyes glowed in the shadows, looking up at me as I leaned over and planted a kiss on the cool, glassy surface of his forehead.

“It’s okay,” I told him. I wasn’t sure he believed me, but then, I wasn’t sure I believed me either. One bombing had shocked me. Two had worried me. After that… I wondered if this was going to pass for normal now, if it would just keep getting worse. Were the days leading up to that first attack the last normal ones any of us would have and we just didn’t know it? Was this really just the beginning?